What we check before we list a factory
A published checklist, so the claim is falsifiable. If we listed a factory that failed one of these, you would be able to tell.
The checks, in order
- The business licence, read properlyWe read the business licence (营业执照) for its business scope (经营范围) — the declared scope of what the company may do — not just for the company name. A trading company's licence and a manufacturer's licence look nearly identical to anyone who skips that field, and that single omission is how middlemen end up listed as factories on every large platform.
- A physical visit to the address on the licenceSomebody from our Shenzhen office goes to the building. The registered address and the production address often differ legitimately, but a factory that cannot show you the second one is not a factory. This is the control; the paperwork is only the prompt for it.
- The production line running on an ordinary dayWe look for the things a scheduled tour is arranged to hide: whether the line is staffed or borrowed for the morning, whether the SMT and ageing equipment is theirs, whether work in progress on the floor matches what they say they make, and whether the quality room has records rather than a desk.
- Certification with dates, not photocopiesCE, UKCA, FCC, PSE, RoHS, ISO 9001, BSCI. The factory files the document itself and we record what is on it — issuer, number, issue date and expiry date — in a private document store. An expired certificate is a compliance failure that lands on you at customs, not on us, so we re-check dates before each shipment rather than at listing time, and one that has lapsed stops being displayed. Where no document has reached us we display nothing at all: a certificate a factory names but never files appears nowhere. What we do not do as a matter of course is establish that a certificate is genuine, so what is displayed here is marked "Unverified by YCP" unless somebody has paid us to check that one document and it stood up. That is between you and the factory; if you would rather have it settled, say so and we will quote a check on the document itself.
- Lithium documentation, if there is a cell in anything they makeUN38.3 test summary and a current safety data sheet, checked against the actual cell in the actual pack. A test report for a different cell configuration is a very common and very expensive discovery to make at the freight forwarder.
- Capacity we can verify against somethingHeadcount, line count and monthly output, cross-checked against what we have actually seen them ship. We record the number we can support, not the number on the sales deck.
What gets a factory removed
Turning out to be a trading company. Refusing a re-visit. Supplying false or forged certification. Substituting cells or components without telling us. Shipping against a rejected inspection. A certificate that has merely lapsed is not on that list: it stops being displayed the day it expires, and the factory has the cure period set out in the supplier terms to renew it before the listing itself is suspended.
Shipping against a rejected inspection is worth stating plainly because it is the most common and the most consequential: a factory that has shipped goods after failing a pre-shipment check has told us what it will do when a deadline is tight, and that is the only information about a supplier that reliably predicts the next problem.
Why the verification mark cannot be bought
Factories pay us for a membership tier, and that tier decides where they appear on this site. It has no effect on whether they are marked as verified. A verification record is written only by the colleague who made the visit, into a table no placement logic can write to — so the mark exists only where a visit has happened, and no tier can bring one into being.
That separation is the whole point. "We have stood in every factory we list" is worth more to this business than any membership fee, and it stops being worth anything the moment it can be bought.
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Every quote against every brief you have filed, in one place.